>I have to agree that the Aquatic Ape theory seems to make more sense >than the savannah theory.

A lot more sense. The savannah theory is basically idiotic. Moreover, one does not need to believe in evolution(ism) in order to comprehend that Morgan is almost certainly correct in thinking that humans originally lived in water; the question of evolution vs creation does not figure into her theory. One could as easily start off assuming that humans originally were created with the adaptations she describes.

But back to the savahhan theory. What's the most major difference between human infants and the young of most prey animals? That's right: the baby deer and wildebeast have the sense to keep quiet. What's gonna happen the first time some group of "protohumans" comes down from the trees and starts trooping across the savannahs, and some human infant starts screaming his head off because something displeased him? I mean, how are all the 400 - 1000 lb predators roaming across the savannah going to INTERPRET that?? As a dinner bell maybe?

Wherever humans originally existed, for whatever reason, sharks must have been absent.

One thing you might notice, there being no plausible ancestor for modern man on this planet after the neanderthal has been eliminated as such by DNA testing, is that there is no real way to know whether modern man arose on this planet or somewhere else. If somewhere else, then probably somewhere else without sharks.

Redwolf, was this a rebuttal or retraction from your aquatic ape banner waving? Sharks have been on this planet longer than humans, so how could they be absent? Or are you proposing early aquatic apes had shark deterrent nets?

Studies of neanderthal DNA have cleanly eliminated the neanderthal as a plausible human ancestor, and all other hominids are much further removed from modern humans THAN the neanderthal. That eliminates the possibility of modern humans having evolved here on this planet, and leaves three choices;

Modern man was created here, from scratch.

Modern man was genetically re-engineered from the neanderthal.

Modern man was brought here from elsewhere.

The "elsewhere" in item three could easily have been a place lacking sharks.

Neanderthal DNA has been described as "halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" and recent scientific studies have concluded that the neanderthal made no detectable contribution to the genetic makeup of modern man. Moreover, all other hominids are much more remote from us than the neanderthal. Somebody who wanted to go on believing that modern man evovled here on Earth would have to come up with some new hominid, closer to us in both time and morphology, and since neanderthal remains and works are all over the map, the remains and works of this closer hominid should be very easy to find, IF he had ever existed. In real life, no such have ever been found.

That leave a clean and total break. There is simply no useful evidence of man evolving here on Earth. Now, you might still claim that man evolved somewhere else and was then brought to this planet, but that's about the best you could do.

Moreover, all of the various stories which we read about man evolving here on Earth are basically ridiculous. Elaine Morgan refers to them generically as "Tarzanism".

Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.

You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:

HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"

What's wrong with that?

The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorialconstants interacting with the requirements of having the extremelyrare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:

Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our apeancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (callhim "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart,Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal deadwhite man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, isgoing to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, biggerJohnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knifefights...

Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chancemutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you onlyhave 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None ofthese mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that atall; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these1000 guys are fully functional.

The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the badmutation) are going to get together and decide something like:

"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."

Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once;Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oopto us. What could possibly be stupider than that?

You still didn't address the ERV's (endogenous retroviral insertions). This is very strong evidence for common ancestory of hominds and new world apes.

Not really. What it really is strong evidence for is genetic engineering and re-engineering in past ages.

Henry Gee

Monday February 12, 2001

The Guardian

The potentially-poisonous Japanese fugu fish has achieved notoriety, at least among scientists who haven't eaten any, because it has a genome that can be best described as "concise". There is no "junk" DNA, no waste, no nonsense. You get exactly what it says on the tin. This makes its genome very easy to deal with in the laboratory: it is close to being the perfect genetic instruction set. Take all the genes you need to make an animal and no more, stir, and you'd get fugu. Now, most people would hardly rate the fugu fish as the acme of creation. If it were, it would be eating us, and not the other way round. But here is a paradox. The human genome probably does not contain significantly more genes than the fugu fish. What sets it apart is - and there is no more succinct way to put this - rubbish.

The human genome is more than 95% rubbish. Fewer than 5% of the 3.2bn As, Cs, Gs and Ts that make up the human genome are actually found in genes. It is more litter-strewn than any genome completely sequenced so far. It is believed to contain just under 31,780 genes, only about half as many again as found in the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (19,099 genes): yet in terms of bulk DNA content, the human genome is almost 30 times the size.A lot is just rubbish, plain and simple. But at least half the genome is rubbish of a special kind - transposable elements. These are small segments of DNA that show signs of having once been the genomes of independent entities. Although rather small, they often contain sequences that signal cellular machinery to transcribe them (that is, to switch them on). They may also contain genetic instructions for enzymes whose function is to make copies and insert the copies elsewhere in the genome. These transposable elements litter the human genome in their hundreds of thousands. Many contain genes for an enzyme called reverse transcriptase - essential for a transposable element to integrate itself into the host DNA.

The chilling part is that reverse transcriptase is a key feature of retroviruses such as HIV-1, the human immunodeficiency virus. Much of the genome itself - at least half its bulk - may have consisted of DNA that started out, perhaps millions of years ago, as independent viruses or virus-like entities. To make matters worse, hundreds of genes, containing instructions for at least 223 proteins, seem to have been imported directly from bacteria. Some are responsible for features of human metabolism otherwise hard to explain away as quirks of evolution - such as our ability to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Thus, monoamine oxidase is involved in metabolising alcohol.

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.

So natural-born human beings are, indeed, genetically modified. Self-respecting eco-warriors should never let their children marry a human being, in case the population at large gets contaminated with exotic genes!One of the most common transposable elements in the human genome is called Alu - the genome is riddled with it. What the draft genome now shows quite clearly is that copies of Alu tend to cluster where there are genes. The density of genes in the genome varies, and where there are more genes, there are more copies of Alu. Nobody knows why, yet it is consistent with the idea that Alu has a positive benefit for genomes.To be extremely speculative, it could be that a host of very similar looking Alu sequences in gene-rich regions could facilitate the kind of gene-shuffling that peps up natural genetic variation, and with that, evolution. This ties in with the fact that human genes are, more than most, fragmented into a series of many exons, separated by small sections of rubbish called introns - rather like segments of a TV programme being punctuated by commercials.

The gene for the protein titin, for example, is divided into a record-breaking 178 exons, all of which must be patched together by the gene-reading machinery before the finished protein can be assembled. This fragmentation allows for alternative versions of proteins to be built from the same information, by shuffling exons around. Genomes with less fragmented genes may have a similar number of overall genes - but a smaller palette of ways to use this information. Transposable elements might have helped unlock the potential in the human genome, and could even have contributed to the fragmentation of genes in the first place (some introns are transposable elements by another name). This, at root, may explain why human beings are far more complex than roundworms or fruit flies. If it were not for trashy transposable elements such as Alu, it might have been more difficult to shuffle genes and parts of genes, creating alternative ways of reading the "same" genes. It is true that the human genome is mostly rubbish, but it explains what we are, and why we are who we are, and not lying on the slab in a sushi bar.

• Deep Time by Henry Gee will be published shortly in paperback by Fourth Estate. He is a senior editor of Nature.Related articles

Gee's statement above which I redlined, again:

If the import of bacterial genes for novel purposes (such as drug resistance) sounds disturbing and familiar, it should - this is precisely the thrust of much research into the genetic modification of organisms in agriculture or biotechnology.

is basically saying that the evidence indicates that humans were engineered the same way we are beginning to engineer new strains of corn and cattle.

Also, this picture of prominent homind fossil skulls seems to refute your argument that there is no other lineage in the fossil record besides Neaders.

I am not aware of any serious scientists who view the talk.origins "FAQ" system as reasonable or honest. Other than that, the skulls in the picture don't add anything. Only one or two skulls have ever been found which might raise any question of human/neanderthal interbreeding which would have to be possible for us to be descended in any way from neanderthals, and those one or two are questionable to say the least. The one I've seen is of a young girl.

Again in case you missed it, I don't see a need to believe in evolution or be an evolutionite in order to believe that what Morgan says is correct, i.e. that humans, regardless of how they came into being, originally lived in water. The evidence she presents is pretty coercive. I'd recommend "Scars of Evolution" as a starting point.

Gives an explanantion as for a reason to stand up on hind legs...to keep that head above water, as opposed to stand an look out for predators.

When you think about it, most monkeys trying to swim the way we do would likely just turn sumersaults in the water. Your legs almost have to be the major limbs to swim any better than dogpaddling; apes' and monkeys' arms are their major limbs.

Neanderthal DNA has been described as "halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" ...

The above erroneous description was taken from an Indian newspaper, which was citing scientific work that said no such thing. Details on google in this thread, and also showing the actual scientific data that the expressindia reporter misrepresented.

A number of different scientists have described neanderthal dna as being about halfway between ours and that of a chimp. You could pretty much do your own google search and take your pick.

"We know if anything is a Neanderthal, this is a Neanderthal," Stringeradded. "One couldn't have hoped for a better specimen."

Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed theNeanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee.

Stringer said the evidence firmly supported the so-called "Out of Africa" theory of human origins. He and others who subscribe to this theory say modern humans evolved in Africa and spread across the world about 100,000 years ago.

The team compared 378 base pairs of the mitochondrial (mDNA- extracted 1,500 DNA molecules)of the Neandertal with that of modern humans. The mitochondria are the energy producingengines of the body, and are passed from female to female with no differences except, as with a clock,random genetic changes. They found an average of 27 differences between the two, which is morethan the normal variation of 8 between modern humans (Nordic, pygmy, Oriental, Aborigine, etc.)The finding indicates that Neanderthal people were a genetically different species. Comparisonsbetween modern humans and apes indicated that Neanderthal was about halfway between a modernhuman and a chimpanzee.

University Park, Pa. -- A team of U.S. and German researchers has extracted mitochondrial DNA from Neandertal bone showing that the Neandertal DNA sequence falls outside the normal variation of modern humans.

When the researchers looked at the Neandertal sequence with respect to 994 human mitochondrial DNA lineages including Africans, Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Australians and Pacific Islanders, they found the number of base pair differences between the Neandertal sequence and these groups was 27 or 28 for all groups. [i.e. halfway to being a chimpanzee]

The comparison to chimpanzees with modern humans is 55.0 ±3.0, compared to the average between humans and Neanderthals of 25.6 ±2.2. these results indicate a divergence od the human and Neanderthal lineages long before the most recent common mtDNA ancestor of humans.

Following the discovery of the Neanderthal DNA, the German scientists compared it to the DNA of humans living today. (No early modern human DNA has ever been uncovered.) A clear difference was apparent between the two types of DNA. So marked was that difference that the Germans concluded that Neanderthals were an entirely separate species of human. A species is a group of organisms that have common characteristics and cannot breed with another species. Because of the distinct difference in DNA, any attempts at interbreeding by Neanderthals and the early modern humans would have failed to yield offspring, the scientists reasoned.

We might really not have anything more than a question of semantics here. I'd interpret the dna findings as meaning that a neanderthal was about halfway from a chimp to us and apparently others do as well and I have seen that comparison in a number of places from a number of authors at one point or another. Some neanderthal skulls show jaws which are attached way back from where ours are which is apelike and the rounded (as opposed to our long) body trunks are also apelike. I've seen claims that neanderthal teeth are apelike and their shorter maturation rate (studies derived from teeth) is also a major difference from us.

Other than that, a chimpanzee is not really a total loss from the point of view of functionality. They can communicate easily enough using deaf signing conventions, they can hunt, engage in gangfights and wars, get drunk, and about the only major sort of thing they can't do is talk and that's apparently from lack of control over breathing as Elaine Morgan describes.

>The error in describing Neandertals as halfway to chimpanzee is exactly the same error as describing Negros as a fifth of the way to chimpanzee.

The two situations are totally different. Neanderthals clearly were a totally different species, sufficiently so to preclude interbreeding altogether.

Modern humans are so genetically close to eachother that it suggests a very recent catastrophic event which reduced the human population to some very small number, and I'd figure that to be prior to the flood since I do not believe that east Asians are descended from Noah.

There is said to be less variation in the entire human race (now) than in a typical tribe of 60 African monkeys.